Noted hurricane scientist to speak in Austin tonight

Sorry I’m just getting to this now, but I wanted to put the word out that Kerry Emanuel, probably the country’s most recognizable hurricane scientist after Bill Gray and Max Mayfield, will speak tonight in Austin on the University of Texas campus from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The talk is free (Full details here).

Emanuel is one of the hottest, most controversial scientists in America, and I highly recommend the talk if you’re anywhere nearby. Emanuel strongly believes climate change is fueling more intense hurricane activity. His publication of this paper in Nature last year sparked much of the debate on this topic.

I’ve heard Kerry speak several times and he makes a strong case — although I’m not entirely sold on his conclusions. Below I’ve copied perhaps his most famous graph, which depicts his “power dissipation index” — basically a cumulative measure of the destructiveness of all a season’s hurricanes — mapped against Atlantic sea surface temperatures.

Nature

From this view of the data it sure looks like intensity matches sea temperatures.

I’m sure some skeptics will dismiss Emanuel, but he’s a sharp scientist making his own interpretation of an imperfect, incomplete dataset (namely: Atlantic hurricane activity prior to 1970). There’s been some criticism, too, that he’s “smoothed” the data too much to make the curves matched.

Still, it’s also worth noting that this talk is being sponsored by UT’s Environmental Science Institute and the Jackson School of Geosciences, as well as ConocoPhillips and the SBC Foundation.

If you have an open mind, he deserves to be heard. Emanuel is doing real science, and has rapidly become one of the biggest names in U.S. science. For those who can’t make Austin the event will also be Webcast. If you attend or watch the Webcast, please be sure to leave feedback below.